Trump A Traitor?

This is what French billionaire (and newly found messianic Jew) pseudo-philosopher Bernard Henri Levy (BHL), wants you to think. BHL wants you to think Trump is a traitor and that BHL is just the opposite. Yet, BHL has been part of the powers that be, at the highest level, for his entire life, even more so than Donald Trump. After BHL made an editorial calling Trump a traitor, I was, naturally, titillated. A comment of mine was immediately blocked (censored). The following is a vast expansion of said comment. Basically BHL tries to drown Trump by inundating him with innuendos… Whereas, in truth, Trump’s major crime is that his dangerous rhetoric threatens the politico-financial milieu created by actors such as BHL. To enrich himself, BHL destroyed the African primary forest. Thus BHL has had much further consequences on world ethics, and lying as the new ethics, than Trump ever had. His hold on the media is frightening.

A foundational lie of modern plutocracy is that Obama and the Clintons are dedicated friends of the poor and downtrodden. Nothing of the sort. The government’s own statistics show it (look at the graph below).

If you don’t know what the Gini Coefficient is, that’s not alright. It may mean you may have a life, but you cannot take an intelligent part in debating what ails the world. Thus, for the sake of general goodness and true progress, let me explain: when a dictator pushes the Gini up, he (and sometimes she) augments the plutocracy, the power of the few, the oligarchs, over the multitude. Here is the sad reality of Obama and Clinton from raw numbers of the Federal REserve Data (FRED):

The Oligarchs Became Richest Ever Under Beloved Leader Obama I. Notice The Colossal Rise of the Gini Under The BelovedClintons & Their “Democratic” Congress. Contrary to repute, Gini stagnated under the evil G W Bush. So why are not Clinton and Bush viewed as even more evil? The ways of the simple are mysterious.

The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1. It is a number to evaluate how much the richest get (it could be income, wealth, education, health, etc.). A country with an income Gini coefficient of 0 means all income is distributed equally. And a country with an income Gini coefficient of 1 means one person gets all the money. This measure was created to show just how skewed goodies distribution was.

Sadly, yet eloquently, despite, or rather precisely because of Obama’s ideologue-strength desire to claim to want to redistribute income, he’s craftily managed to make the rich get richer while the poor got poorer. And this, at record levels. Thus, if you hated Bush that way, you should excoriate Obama.

Obama & Democratic Congress Cut Taxes On Richest Taxpayers At The Beginning Of Obama’s Reign. [They also transferred trillions to the richest under ‘Quantitative Easing’, but that’s not in the graph above!]

And this is exactly how many Trump supporters are feeling like: the victims of a giant conspiracy, complete with lying media, pseudo-liberal economists, and pseudo-philosophers railing against We The People.

‘Something Is Going On, And You Don’t Know What It Is, Mr. Jones’ (Bob Dylan)

The last few times I saw Bernard Henri Levy (BHL) on TV, 2016, he talked to no end about “Jewishness”, and the “genius of Judaism”. He had even just written a book about it. The French audience stayed ominously scornful. When he rose to leave the stage of the famous debate show ONPC, nobody, not even one person in the audience of hundreds, applauded (although BHL was the major guest of the evening). Nobody was amused.

Why? When the ugly face of religious war is surfacing in France again, fanatics of this, that, or the other cult, are intuitively disliked: they don’t seem like offering anything but strife. Many, among We The People, rightly perceive racism, which consists in treating people differently because of their origins.

Indeed, BHL does not like Trump to “emphasize Jewishness“. “Emphasizing Jewishness” is a crime if Trump does it, says BHL, yet a blessing when BHL goes ballistic about it. BHL should read carefully “Night” of Elie Wiesel, where the latter (one of many Jews to do so, including philosopher Hannah Arendt) considers that exaggerated “Jewishness” was a factor in the satanic brew which brought the Shoah. Indeed. There are rarely single causes, most often, web of causes.

The critiques of BHL against Trump, much of them hearsay or wild deliberate misinterpretations, may, or may not be justified. They would be justified if the facts were really as depicted, not just well-founded as industrial strength hearsay. Even then, Trump is a blabber box, who sometimes warns his audience that he may not know what he is talking about, and that his opinion may change in the future. This is an unusual approach for a politician, it strikes many as sincere… And it is. Yes, it’s frightening, but it’s intrinsic to the present system of government we have: a few people, elected or not, fairly or not, have too much power.

The final complaint of BHL against Trump is infidelity. “Infidelity to America.” Whines he:

“The implications of Trump’s election would be truly terrifying. The problem would not only be his vulgarity, sexism, racism, and defiant ignorance. It would be his possible infidelity to America itself. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has been commandeered by a corrupt demagogue who betrays not only his country’s ideals, but also its fundamental national interest.

American vertigo. Global disaster.”

That’s rich. Eisenhower passed a 93% tax on the wealthiest. BHL himself is the exact opposite: he is one of the wealthiest, stealing wealth from the poorest (Africans, poor French taxpayers). BHL co-opted the entire French state under both Mitterrand and his successor Chirac to extract his father’s company from bankruptcy, and make himself a billionaire. BHL got the help of billionaire Pinault, to intercede with president Chirac, and pass the appropriate law in the French National Assembly. BHL’s life is a testimony to the sort of entanglement of political power and the hyper wealthy, which disgusts so much so many of Trump (and Sanders!) supporters. Ironically, BHL has been in very close, loud and clear relationships with many of the world’s leading politicians, in a way he hints Trump also does with Putin.

So why does a plutocrat such as BHL dislikes Trump so much? Because Trump said many times that the plutocrats who do not presently pay taxes, for example hedge fund managers, will, should he become president. BHL is scared that this mood, this mood of taxing the wealthy, will propagate (even in France, the wealthiest legally escape tax in many ways made to strike the poor hard).

Policies Engineered by US Leaders Since Reagan’s Reign Are Obviously Wrong. Time For A Vast Change We Can See. European Parrots May Follow.

In his editorial BHL claims Trump’s call to renegotiate some debt would reduce the US to Argentinian status. Yet, some debt could be renegotiated: after all, president Roosevelt devalued the dollar and cut US national debt by 33%, the day he got to power.

That a pillar, and prime recipient of the present established order, such as BHL, does not like Trump is hardly surprising. Trump has stated, loud and clear that he would severely modify the established order, making lots of bad actors, and free riders, pay. Trump want bad actors and free riders, from Amazon Inc. to hedge fund managers, to sanctimonious members of NATO who don’t pay for their own defense, to pay for the advantages they enjoy.

That so many of the “vulgum” BHL despises so much, so explicitly, are ready to vote against the established order, is refreshing. I would have preferred Sanders. Individuals such as BHL, who found the money in the coffers of states, they needed to cut the entire forests of some African countries, to buy themselves palaces all over the world, and dominate the media relentlessly, should get their comeuppance.

Trump demolished Jeb Bush by calling him a “liar” about the invasion of Iraq. Bush could not find a way to reply to that. Not just once, or twice, did Trump call Bush a liar, but hundreds of times. And Trump insisted with outright blustering anger that the entire government of Jeb’s brother G W Bush had lied too. And it worked: average right-wing Republicans, by voting for Trump, agreed that the Bush family was a family of liars. It is telling of the sorry state of US politics that no American politicians had ever made such a furious denunciation of the Iraq invasion prior to that. (Yes, Clinton, as a crucial Senator, voted for the Iraq invasion, to help her friend G. W. Bush; Trump will accuse her to be either a liar or an idiot, or both, on this subject.)

Of this, this alone, real progressives should be grateful. And what of the wall Trump wants to build? Some will whine. Well, the wall already exists. Just look at that Gini above. That’s just the one on income. The one on wealth is way worse. And the one on after tax income jumped after Obama became president, because democrats decided to help the economy by taxing the wealthiest less, and pumping into them trillions through the Federal Reserve (“Quantitative Easing”)

In Africa, huge crocodiles look like friendly trunks, placidly laying there in the water. Lying there or laying there? That is the question many animals are not able to solve. Trump may not be the friend of the common person. However BHL has spent his entire life trying to demonstrate, to himself, that he was a good person. When obviously, he knows perfectly well that he is exactly the sort of crook the world is sick with, doing the sort of things which should be rewarded in the future not with billions, as he was, but with long prison sentences.

I am not for Trump. I am not advocating to be trumped by Trump. The choice between the insufferable Trump and the corrupt Clinton illustrates perfectly well the abysmal nature of representative politics. But I am certainly against liars, and lying in general. Much of what was presented as “progress” in the West since the Fall of the Berlin Wall was actually addictive lying. Yes, GDP went up, in the UK, or the US. But mostly GDP of the rich: watch Irish GDP going up 26% a year, thank to tax evasion.

The lie? That this sort of industrial strength legal tax evasion has nothing to do with most people’s lives getting ever harder. Lying is addictive because, with humans, perception, even perception of happiness, is (nearly) everything. When We The People lives the lie that exploitation is redemption, they live happy.

Increasingly it feels as if lying were most of the industry of the West: contemplate the fact that Obama and Clinton, who brought up the US Gini (on both income and wealth) up to heights never seen before, are really viewed by the losers they stole as their best friends. At some point though, those who do not view We The People as vulgar, may win. A different regime of truth will apply.

So is Trump a traitor? Let’s hope so. He would betray his class, as he already betrayed the Neoconservatives (who were all about invading Iraq). When one looks at history on the largest scale, one can see that revolutions are often led by plutocrats who betrayed their own class (the Gracchi, and Caesar were from the very top of Roman society; they were assassinated; had they lived, the Roman Republic may well have survived, and progress forged ahead without the Dark Ages; a queen of the Franks outlawed slavery in the Seventh Century; several otherwise vicious Russian leaders propped Russia forward; and so on).

Maybe Trump is a piece of trash. Yet, when he got people to vote for him by decrying the “wrong system” he admitted he was a product of, and he was “wrong” and “part of the establishment”, Trump says important things, and set-up a different mood. A better mood that the one of embracing lies, just because they feel good.

The future is here: it looks just like the past. Lying is its cement, generously provided by the ruling class. Decrying lying is nothing new: the Cathars insisted that most of Christianism was a gigantic lie. Maybe the part of the universe humans lived in was controlled by Evil. That would explain the “Catholic Orthodox” church’s nature. The Cathars were, obviously, and in retrospect right. They were most believed in the most democratic and republican part of Europe, the giant county of Toulouse and surrounding areas. The establishment was not amused, and kill both the Cathars and their books, to the last (millions died, one million in France alone).

At some point, history did not repeat and real progress was made. First by analyzing the past. The time has come to analyze with more subtlety than ever.

33 Responses to “Trump A Traitor?”

Yes, Trump has made some bold statements that needed to be said- yet for every gem there are at least ten times more that appear he is unhinged. If only Sanders could have tapped into the electorate of the Dems as well as Trump had with the GOP, it would be a much better situation. Trump has a repugnant nature and fascist tendencies that will likely ruin any chance for him becoming president.
Hillary is a more capable candidate than the GOP clowns that Trump faced and he knows it. He is already posturing about debates etc to keep the media focused on him. Even though pushed to the left by Sanders and his supporters, will she pull a Bill? Or will she break the pattern? A president can only do so much, so will a Hillary victory help change the GOP lock on both chambers?
Trump appears to be for Trump more than anything else and his Putin fetish is disturbing so even the good points he has made get buried by his rants and displays of poor temperament. The Sanders voters are a key element – can Hillary win them over and then follow through to do what is right? Not likely any Trump supporter will be swayed.
Two candidates that are more disliked than liked. It is ugly.

Hillary looks like an unhinged two year old in a candy store, showing her teeth all over, mouth gaping. Trump looks just unhinged. What a choice indeed. That small, poor people still love that thief Bill Clinton is a mystery to me too.

It’s like with Brexit: people’s minds are made of what plutocrats like Bloomberg, Koch or this BHL tell them to believe. That’s exactly why they shut you up. Still, keep on going, Sanders and Trump success this year Herald a coming revolution

That a broken watch happens to give the completely accurate time twice a day does not make it any less broken. And you never know when it is right.

The really atrocious news is Clinton. That Sanders failed to “tap into Dem electorate” as SDM says (more a failure of the Dems I would say) demonstrates how much “the people” actually like to fuck themselves. ‘scuse my French.

Truly depressing times… nothing can be achieved worldwide without the US on board. A lose-lose situation.

Trump is Trump. Trump does what Trump has always done (I have been observing him for decades). He is pretty much genuine about some of his quirks. I tend to shrug about what he dares to say. The Deep State is here to tell him really not implementing Article 5 of NATO is a no-no. But something needs to be done about NATO military spending (France is at 1.96% of military spending versus GDP, and augmenting; other Western countries are VERY far from that, except for Uncle Trump Sam.

I do agree that the really atrocious news is Clinton. Sanders’ failure is more than a bit his fault. He should not have just run against Clinton, but hate her. Sanders should have learned from Trump early on. If Sanders had used Trump’s methods, he would have crushed Clinton. How? Confront her about the emails, loudly ask that justice be done, instead of telling us Clinton was not to be bothered with the law. Also call Clinton a liar, an idiot, an incompetent, and corrupt about the invasion of Iraq. Go all out, as Trump did to Bush, Rubio and Cruz: “Why do you lie so much?” Trump told them. Sanders could have used exactly the same lines, and SHAME democratic voters into NOT voting for Clinton, exactly as Trump did with Republican voters. Why do you lie so much, Ms. Secretary????

Well, if Trump makes it (as I guess he will), eventful times, after 8 years of Obama slumber are ahead… Obama sleeps only 5 hours a night, reading this site too much, from sheer masochism. When he is president no more, he is going to sleep 5 months, and when he will wake up, like a marmot in spring, he will realize he wasted our times for eight years of sleep-walking…

Is it possible that some (all?) successful politicians, like surfboarders, can read the waves, see the direction and dynamics, and surf them successfully until they don’t and there’s a wipeout?
In the meantime, we are subjected to much too much commentary about personality, likeability, policy, and the like. When it’s the underlying flow (the mood of the crowd) we should be watching.
Maybe that flow is what some surfer politicians are picking up on (Brexit, Trump, LePen?).

And nice job Patrice, love your stuff but you are so intimidatingly good!

Thanks John, and you are too graciously pleasant! The successful politicians have read the waves of mood well. The better ones are those who create the mood they ride (Reagan and Thatcher are good examples). By “better” here, I mean as power tools of those who truly use them. Such as having a “better” lawn mower.
Trump is a bit different from low lives such as the Iron Lady and the co-star of Peggy the chimp in “Bedtime for Bonzo”.http://mentalfloss.com/article/52538/time-ronald-reagan-was-nearly-strangled-chimp

Trump’s career does not depend upon politics. Trump, actually did not need a career, as long as he could be a loose canon. That’s why he could play loose canon in the Republican primaries, blasting Jeb and company into pieces, with arguments which became a mood, from sheer repetition, hammering away. Now he has created a mood skeptical about “free trade” which Clinton is trying to ride (see her flip-flop about the TPP)… The debates will be interesting…

Being skeptical about “free trade” was an old approach of the left, long forgotten after decades of “liberal”, “free trade” propaganda…

Very nice post, that reflects too well the sad reality (thanks for the recent Gini and other numbers) we live in.
Were it not so sad, it would be almost funny to see how vehemently this reality is denied by the most conservatives of all, who happen to be the ex would-be socialist revolutionaries of the 80’s. They have truly come around full circle from Mao to Wall Street (Glucksman, Bruckner et all), but they have somehow managed to maintain their “moral dignity”. BHL is probably one the worst.
The new avatar of the “Gauche Divine” described by Baudrillard in the early 1980’s is well alive, and more cynical, disdainful and lying than ever.

The state of the presidential election in the US has long reached a shameful stage, but it seems to me not enough people realize how much a plutocracy this country has become (your blog is a breath of fresh air in that sense). Truly a power gone crazy, with the need to make imaginary external enemies to re-ascertain its illusions of greatness.

Sad, sad world we live, but the tide might be changing a bit on the international stage. Even if not for the greater good, seeing alternatives is always better than having to surrender to a single, omnipotent adversary, especially when it itself is a hollow shell.

Indeed, you are very right. Brexit has, or rather should have, kicked the dust up. But the powers that be are not paying much attention: the mood is turning to destruction, rather than status quo ante… People really had enough. Once the French prez elections come around, and Marine Le Pen looms as a possibility, maybe the Brexit message will sink in. By then, if Trump has been elected, Le Pen’s way will be easier. She, BTW, is smart enough, like Trump to be where she is not expected (something May is hell bent to do in Britain).

Hard to predict what would happen. But it is sure that the (Euro = Austerity) equation, which has no reason to be, but for unhinged plutocracy, has got to go. Clearly France in handicapped scientifically and militarily by it. All of Europe’s companies are suffering from not profiting from the state help Chinese and Obamese companies are getting…

Sanders did come across as much too limited in his message and failed to really attack in his debates with Hillary. He had the opportunity but was outmaneuvered by Hillary and the DNC- his only chance was to be pummel her at her weakest points. Too little too late to overcome her political machine.
Trump has channeled a deep seething anger in the white voters both working class and small business owners. NRA gun faction and Racist element also get a nod from Trump. His lack of any detailed plans makes no difference to his voters. Yet where is there any real threat to plutocracy in his agenda?

Sanders’ mind I don’t understand. He attacked the symptoms with gusto, but those symptoms originated with a particular social organization (plutocracy) whose messenger and defender was Clinton. So he should have demolished her personally. Instead he preferred to camp as the idealistic figure of the White Knight. When he seemed to have understood he could have won, he had passed the opportunity to demolish Hillary and the DNC.

Confronted with the exact same problem, Trump went into total attack dog mode, tearing both fellow candidates and the RNC with equal vigor, making the worst accusations.

If Sanders had used Trump’s tactics, he would have defeated HRC. As simple as that. Right now, politics is (VERY) dirty, and if one wants to stay clean, one will be, at best, ineffectual. Although there are exceptions: Jerry Brown in California. Although governor eight years, and governor again now, after bouts as attorney general and Oakland mayor, he is still around because he is really a local guy (he lives in Oakland) and Californians know him extremely well (Harris is following the same model). Yet, his presidential bid, long ago, as Governor Moonbeam (as he was called then) failed in part from lack of dirty tactics.

And Obama himself is case in point: he wanted to apply many of the ways and means advocated on this site. YET, because he is used to do what he is told to do, and it worked well for him, and because he is afraid of really very big waves, we ended up, or rather, down, with Obamacare and lots of pro-plutocratic policies… [Quantitative Easing, Mercantilist economics, etc…]

Trump is of course extremely dangerous to the installed plutocracy, which tends to be global and financial. Trump’s deals with bankers are of the traditional type: he wants money from them to build bigger stuff with bigger hands. In any case, Trump made very explicit that the present arrangements, the rule of high finance, hedge fund managers, and the likes of Amazon will be submitted to taxation, something Obama did not even try to do, and a global horror.

Under Obama, most money went Dark. Namely its owners cannot be tracked (let alone taxed). We went from 11% to more than 50%. Obama let it happen, concentrating instead all his efforts into punishing the travelling middle class and small times retirees with “FATCA”. Obama has protested “inversions”, but he did nothing spectacular to prevent them. Something spectacular would be to put a few CEOs in chain, just like Reagan did with air traffic controllers… Instead, Obama is still meekly helping the inverted companies…

Also note the situation with North Korea is catastrophic, and only in recent weeks did Obama announce that banks would be punished if they kept on helping North Korea. My hunch is that Trump will try to act, and be hot, instead of just trying to look cool and sleeping just five hours a night. I prefer a president JFK, FDR, or Teddy Roosevelt type, a charger (something Bush Senior also was, BTW, but discreetly, so discreetly he lost to Clinton, on the basis of a recession which had ended).

We were trumped when Obama tricked us with trickle down economics that nobody seems to have noticed ever since it happened (the New York Times finally mentioned tax rates on the very richest were lowered by Obama at the beginning of his first term in…. 2016.)

This election really puzzles me. You have two candidates that seem way down in the popularity lists, and with the Dems, who in principle should be who the working class support, you have the candidate for the very rich, and opposing her, the candidate who really ought to work out why he is there and what he wants to do, but is the best bet for making the very rich pay their dues. Weird!

Dear Ian: A bit of personal history helps. Clinton is basically an arrivist (a French word which means someone whose prime motivation is to arrive at some exalted position; Obama is also an arrivist, but less so). So Clinton would sell herself to Lucifer, as long as she can get to the top.
Trump started with everything… Except respect. The family had to hide it was German. Then his dad got insulted, told he was a racist by the government, and young Trump could not take it: he sued the Federal government for libel. He (sort of) won. Later he sued pseudo-Indians who had tribal advantages he could not get, etc.
Thus, whereas Clinton seduced the powers that be all of her life, Trump hated them, and tried to use them against themselves.

Once again, I would have preferred Sanders. Trump has done some useful work, from a progressive stand point by excoriating and proposing (see my answer to HoMegas). Clinton I feel is such a liar, her and her close supporters/propagandists, that I am not even listening to what they say, as I believe everyone of their statements is a lie (I worked for Obama for two years in 2007/2008, and will never recover of the consequential shattering of my illusions… Including being told I was a loose canon with unpredictable behavior the president should be sheltered from, brrrr… Reminds me of Jihadists in the business of protecting God…)

In any case, Trump is rather faithful to himself… And Hillary? Two, three years ago, I could have believed she secretly disagreed with Bill on some things. Now i do not. And the democrats have been unwilling to admit their policies in the 1990s brought Earth to where it is at now… At least the republicans, by selecting Trump, admitted that they were wrong about Iraq…

Me too.
Yet the fundamental problem remain: the fate of spaceship Earth should not be in the hands of one person.
It’s high time to opt for a governmental structure different of the one Montezuma II enjoyed (until he discovered he had taken some bad decisions).

It’s clear that “Globalism” has betrayed “We The People”. It’s also clear that most of the campaign against Trump, at this point, is a deluge of insults and pseudo-factoids, instead of about issues. Like Trump just proposed a trillion dollar stimulus (that would make it around twice bigger than the vaunted Obama stimulus in 2009, in full crisis). Questions to pseudo-progressives: why did not Clinton suggest it, if she is so progressive? Instead she pounded at Sanders that he could not pay for his program (of course he could, should he have wanted to tax the hyper rich!)

Nota Bene: I do not partake of Hitler equation: Plutocracy = Jewry. However, certainly the creation of money by bankers was an activity which, although started in Florence, 8 centuries ago, involved SOME Jews later (famously, the Rothschilds).
BHL is self-obsessed. He works (on drugs!) for himself first… Judaism is the latest trick he found to hide him from himself.

BHL is the manifestation of Jewish narcisism and intellectualloid rubbish, but he has a very clear goal in helping the Zionist project, he is networked among American and European elites, he recently made a movie promoting the Kurdish separatists that would further desistabilize the Middle-East.

Kurdistan is still another problem. Methinks Kurds would be happy in Kurdistan, if they were not that divided. After all, when Britain and France tried to dismantle Turkey in Anatolia (to save millions of Greeks, among others), they failed militarily (the Franco-Brits did not try too hard, being exhausted after WWI). The Kurds are divided to this day.

I, BTW, support Kurdistan. But only as a republic of secular law.
Otherwise, it’s true that BHL dominates, and long has been, and has extraordinary access to Euro-American media (and has censored ALL my more than 100 comments… Although curiously some of my semnantics and ideas appear under his pen. BTW, I was first by at least a year, on Libya. But of course not the way it went after the fall of Tripoli: Europe should have sent the army, and organize the state, which should be made extremely confederal, with the re-institutionalizing of the pre-Islamist civilization, where local people ask for it, for example in the mountains south of Tripoli…)

Very well said, PA. The plutocrats so quick to pretend, standing beside democracy and against Trump. Not only with BHL in Europe, but Mr. Bloomberg in USA. Then of course we see Warren Buffet smiling and hugging Hillary, both putting on a show for the middle class, and pointing at Trump, saying, “Look, it’s not me, not me.”

And then what is this mysterious turnabout for the fiendishly right-wing Meg Whitman of California? She is suddenly ready to campaign on the side of Hillary? Ha, mysterious not! It is as you said, Obama and the Dems “craftily managed to make the rich get richer while the poor got poorer.”

This whole cadre of plutocrats knows on which team to place their bets, and for whom the taxes are lowered. What a masterful show they are giving for the sheep, as good as any illusion or dance at the Cirque du Soleil, Or should we say, a Cirque du Hadès.

Cirque du Hades, indeed! All the Silicon Valley billionaires are for Hillary: under Obama, Musk’s wealth went from zero to 12 billion dollars (all of them can be tracked to government subsidies). This is typical. The evil mercantilism now pervading the justice and legal systems, which has been modified to help the largest (plutocratic) companies. The excuse for all this is that Obama is not very educated. So he does not realize that, by favoring the richest, he undermines not just the economy, but also science and high tech itself.

But who cares? We do, they don’t. Those people are, in the end, all about themselves, something they maximize by supporting the winning plutocratic clan. You pointing at Whitman and Buffet is of the essence. Whitman is indeed “fiendishly rightwing” (her sons are extremely privileged, including by the justice system; part of Princeton, where they went, is named after her…)

In any case, thanks for the support, kevishaw! Changing the mood of We The People has often proven impossible, in a timely manner, in the full picture of history. But that makes trying to do it, all the more challenging, thus interesting… If we get enougn noise for the correct point of view, ultimately, it may end up being seen as such.

“Changing the mood of We The People has often proven impossible, in a timely manner, in the full picture of history.”

TBH, one would tend to think that “moods” change when
1) they crash against Reality, and/or
2) when the people who carry them die off (if only from old age).

In regard to France, BHL, and the mood he helped mould to much personal benefit, everything is already breaking up against the real; still, this has been true almost from the start, 30-40 years ago, this is simply increasingly harder to swipe under the rug (but it still can done, cf. the video of the Seine Saint-Denis bus firebombed at the cries of allah ackbar, viral in the English language web, absolutely ignored by French mass-media); I mean, when Mai 68 is symbolically slaughtered by its own legacy, as in the satisfyingly ironical Charlie Hebdo massacre, there is no denying nor relativising nor excusing it, as per the litany of “diversity-enabled” faits divers or societal changes for the worse of the late 70’s onward.
A Catholic priest found with his cut throat a couple years ago IIRC could be ignored away as a suicide (?), but in the aftermath of the Nice happy drive, not so much.
Nothing has fundamentally changed, it’s just that the direst symptoms are not so deniable.
But still, no effective change in “mood”.

So, I guess we are back to waiting for the death of that generation, with that “mood” going to the grave along its unrepentant, unpunished enablers and selfish benefiters.

I grimly approve this statement… Including your “Schadenfreunde” (a German word of common usage in the US, meaning finding pleasure in others’ misfortune). There is some grim justice to see the INDISCRIMINATE multiculturalism crash and burn. Less funny, is that we are going down with it..

BHL will always be capable of fleeing to his palatial Manhattan apartment… And keep on fascinating American pseudo-intellectuals, with his pseudo, and now decisively Biblical, “philosophy”.

Yeah, “schadenfreunde” was a buzzword in online US conservative circles back in the oo’s, I’m pretty aware of its meaning – “jubilation morbide” en bon français. I wonder if it is as used by the same nowadays, with the USA having for all purpose lost their Stalingrad battle (AKA the Iraq war), the consequences of that defeat still unfolding for all parties?
And, yes, it is funny mostly when it happens to others, and when one escapes consequences, making for a rather perverse sentiment, and a flimsy, illusory one to boot.

Methinks the second best thing for the USA after owning Iraqi oil, was to prevent others to exploit it.
The on-going Iraq war achieves this purpose. The Geneva Convention made the former impossible.If Iraq had massively produced oil, “tight oil” (fracking) would not have been profitable, hence the USA would not have become again the world’s number one producer of fossil fuels, and energy independent.
Not exactly Stalingrad.
The objective of the thrust on Stalingrad’s was to protect the flank of the Nazi army in charge of grabbing Caucasus oil (Baku). To provide the Reich with oil, Stalingrad was a failure, Iraq a success.

BTW, the “people change one funeral at a time” or variation thereof comes form the great Planck, who was also a great Prussian nationalist, and paid a heavy price for it (as I have documented). IIRC, one son got captured by the French in WWI, another killed. Then Planck met Hitler, could not make him tunnel to the real world, and then saw another son, his preferred executed by the Nazis in 1945. More exactly I should say: assassinated by the Nazis.

That taught him to sign the notorious proclamation of the 93, in WWI, where abominable, NAZI LIKE, NAZI GENERATING, NAZI FORMATTING, German war crimes, which had really happen for all to see, were denied (later Planck claimed he signed the declaration but did not inhale, i mean, did not read it…)

[Sent to New York Times, and immediately erased five times, blocked and censored!]

Should Hillary veer full right now we would know that her claim to be a moderate republican was a fake-out to defeat Bernie Sanders. In truth, she would just be the Goldman-Sachs, financial titans’ candidate.

Only her gender could be used as an argument to vote for her. On the negative side, her flip-flopping would reveal her to be even less trustful than Trump himself!

The Clinton crowd of plutocrats and sycophants think her election is in the bag. Looking at latest polls. Krugman saw the danger, that she reveals now that she is a fake center left and real right winger

PA : “Not exactly Stalingrad.
The objective of the thrust on Stalingrad’s was to protect the flank of the Nazi army in charge of grabbing Caucasus oil (Baku). To provide the Reich with oil, Stalingrad was a failure, Iraq a success.”

It depends on how one sees it; I didn’t mean Stalingrad as an actual comparison, but as a symbolical one. I have zero, idea what the OIF was all about, methinks it was a mash-up of strategic goals, aims, from different (vying?) factions and centres of powers. Grabbing (preferably) and/or shutting off (if nothing else succeed) Iraqi oil credibly may have been on the mind of the “oil faction”, absolutely no doubt here.
BUT, my “Stalingrad” point is that “picking up (Iraq) and throwing it against the wall”, to borrow a pleasant neocon image, WAS part of the goals, no doubt here neither. And as Stalingrad was to be a symbolical show of will, where Germany would throw everything it had into the fray and emerge the victor, Iraq was the place where the USA would throw everything, break the will of their opponents, and emerge reaffirmed in their dominance and re-entrenched in their leading status. Not an actual battle, but a symbol, a psychological tipping point.
And, the USA gave everything it had, and it petered out in a clusterfuck of sorry underperformance and wastefulness (if not downright corruption); the use of their power was to reaffirm their power, it instead proved “America can’t do a thing”, to again borrow a quote (attributed to Khomeiny IIRC). What is the point of such military might, if such might is mediocre and impotent, even when not trying to get outside of its comfort zone?
From there, we’ve got the Georgian August 2008 for example, or Russia standing up again more generally speaking, the Chinese feeling their military oats, or the “Sunni” deciding to take on the “Shiite crescent” (fed by the US failure) on its own, though its proxies. All this because of that US Stalingrad.
Hell, even the USA leadership know this, going from that “7 regime changes – through invasion – in 5 years” hubris from the early 00’s to the tried and true covert or clandestine efforts (at which the USA remain unrivaled masters. A Nation of shopkeepers, as well) : Arab springs, Syria, Ukraine; their military might kept used for what it is the most suited, geopolitical theatre and posturing, since actually *using* it, even against 3rd rate opponents, just doesn’t work and is unaffordable (paying a world war fee to lose a couple regional wars, and pitifully so).

On the plus side, the narrative of the US military supremacy is well and alive, at least on a globish level (on global leadership level, probably not so much, hence the mild success of the Rafale, thankfully being undone through political bickering as I type); it is the narrative of France as a shorthand for weakness and ineffectivity that is now ingrained as truth. Success, at least.

The USA masters the global discourse, this is all what matters. For supremacy. It is the equivalent of choosing the surprise, the location and the timing of an attack in war. A country such as France, or Europe in general, is completely on the defensive, just from that.

An example: in the US, the anti-decolonization discourse has been so strong and misleading that the average American and globalized person probably feels that it is the USA which defeated slavery and racism. The French would laugh: fatal mistake. Just as “inversion” and the like, bemoaned disingenuously by Obama, actually quickly augments the power of US companies.

So in the Stalingrad of semantics and semiotics we observe, the great loser is European culture, and the great winner, American plutocratic mindset…

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